If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Internet Blacklist Legislation

"Just the other day, President Obama urged other countries to stop censoring the Internet. But now the United States Congress is trying to censor the Internet here at home. A new bill being debated in Congress would have the Attorney General create an Internet blacklist of sites that US Internet providers would be required to block.

This is the kind of heavy-handed censorship you'd expect from a dictatorship, where one man can decide what web sites you're not allowed to visit. But the Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to pass the bill quickly -- and Senators say they haven't heard much in the way of objections!"

Re: Internet Blacklist Legislation

Some would say it's another assault upon our right of free speech. Some sees it as a move to monitor the activity of its' citizens i.e. surveillance. Of course others will argue that it's for the sake of national security that we do this. What is the point of restricting more freedom by having more security? It's not good even if they argue it might be. Key word is "might." Will it actually be good? There's no guarantee that it will be.

Sometimes I think these lawmakers have nothing more to do than pass laws that will benefit their pockets and those that fill those pockets.

Re: Internet Blacklist Legislation

If Barack Obama wants to censor the internet in America whilst telling other countries not to censor theirs, then that confirms the reasoning behind the creation and use of the internet by American globalists, beecause they're obviously trying to ensure the flow of information including propaganda is outwards from America and not the other way around (they don't want radical Islam spreading their views in America, but everyone else is expected to open their culture to Vivid Video and gangsta rap lol). There is purposefully only one Internet across the world, which obviously needs regulating somehow, we know it was founded from the start to promote American ideals of liberal democracy, and Americans want to maintain control oer the internet they created as a Trojan horse into other societies instead of letting it break up through non-Americans using national firewalls.

"The Internet is a political or ethical concept, rather than technological concept. It threatens to impose itself on the world. It is the Net itself which is wrong: freedom from censorship, or equality of access, cannot make it good. The conclusion is simple: the Net must be cut, and Europe is the place to start."

"Net-ism is wrong because it is coercively expansionist. There is no inherent or inevitable technical or historical trend to a single communication network. On the contrary: never before in history, have so many separate networks been technically possible. Linking all networks together is a conscious choice by some people, a choice then imposed on others. The logic is identical to that of colonial governments, which forced peasants into the agricultural market, by imposing cash taxes. (To pay the tax, the peasants had to sell cash crops such as sugar). This logic says in effect: 'no one is free to stay outside the free market'. Today, not just governments, but business, social movements, intellectuals and artists, all want to impose the Net. This broad movement is obviously more than profit-seeking (and a non-profit Net would also be wrong). It is an ideological movement seeking ideological imposition. That imposition itself, the universalism, the expansionism, their involuntary nature, the basic unfreedom to exit - that is what makes liberal structures wrong. That applies to the free market, and it applies inherently to the Internet.

The basic model for the Net is taken from classic liberalism: it is an electronic 'laissez-faire, laissez-aller' free market. Activists in the US quote explicitly from the Anglo-American liberal tradition - see any issue of Wired, the most influential periodical for the new media world, www.hotwired.com. That tradition determines their attitude toward the state: they want a night-watchman state in electronic form, minimally regulated. (And classic problems of liberal societies, such as the conflict between sexual morality and 'sex as product' have appeared again in cyberspace). This entire model is ethically untenable. The Net affects others, beyond its users, so the users may not make the rules themselves. No internal regulation (or lack of it) can be justified a priori, as a substitute for external regulation. Internet users cannot decide to exclude the state (or anyone else) as regulator, just because they do not like that regulation. There are other people and other issues to consider, not just the Internet users themselves.

It is useful at this point to summarise the characteristics and goals of liberalism: it seeks to (a) maximise interaction; (b) to maximise the number of those interacting; (c) to maximise the number affected by each transaction; and (d) to maximise the zone where interaction takes place. By creating chains of interactions, it transmits cause and effect - it collectivises action. A concrete example: the ethics of global distribution of wealth and income. You (as an individual) cannot correct global inequalities, by buying one pack of coffee - not even if you check every purchase for trade inequalities. You can not (for instance) improve the condition of the rural poor in Ethiopia, by individual purchasing strategies. You have no individual control over the economy you live in, and therefore no individual control of your life. Similarly, you have no individual control over the Internet, and can therefore take no moral decisions concerning it. This is what makes liberalism and its structure unethical: they destroy the moral autonomy of the subject. If the Net can be proved liberal, it can be proved unethical.

For cyber-ideology, however, the greatest advantage of Internet, is an advantage that is derived from liberal models. Liberals see ideas and opinions as objects of exchange: if a liberal has an opinion, he or she wants to 'express it' and exchange it with others. The priority of dialogue and communication, in neo-liberal theories (such as communicative ethics), parallels the priority of market exchange, in classic liberalism. (In this sense communicative ethics, and dialogue ethics, have already set the political-ethical framework for cyberspace). The information society is a liberal society of hyper-exchange: the citizen transmits, receives, and forwards a stream of ideas and opinions - as a sort of Nick Leeson of communication. It is certainly true that only the Internet (or something like it) could make this possible: however, that does not make it morally or politically right."

"It is then that another principle of liberalism takes effect, one which links it to other ideologies. Innovative minorities are disadvantaged in liberal societies. Yet no-one may leave, even if they suffer from all the intense interaction. No-one may exit the 'arenas of interaction' - the market, liberal-democracies, the global economy, Internet. 'Arena' is one metaphor for this situation: it suggests people are forced into an interaction that they did not choose. However, some people, indeed many people, enter these arenas voluntarily: but that does not allow them to drag others in with them. However, the metaphor of the Net itself is even better: 'nets' and 'webs' are used to catch prey.

If the prey simply walks away, liberalism ends: there is no market without participants, no liberal-democracy, and no Internet. Liberalism's answer to this prospect is simple: make escape impossible. There may be only one economy, the free market economy. There may be only one form of state, liberal-democratic. There may be only one Internet. One thing unites all texts about Internet: the word is always in the singular. So too, almost always, the word cyberspace. The intention, usually stated explicitly, is to unite all communication networks, all communication. In economists' terms, the Internet is a monopoly by definition.

A monopoly, if it is to stay a monopoly, must allow no alternatives, and it must not divide itself. Monopoly implies unity: monopoly implies expansion to the limit. A global economy is not a global economy, if there are two of it. Being global means being one unit, and being unchallenged. This is an aspect of more than economics: there is a long history, in western and non-western thought, of Unity as a valued principle, Unity as the end of all things. Its modern variants (philosophical anticipations of the cyberspace concept) are often derived from the work of Teilhard de Chardin. These evolutionary-holistic ideas are diffused throughout New Age movements: from these movements, they have influenced holistic visions of cyberspace, and ultimately the idea of a global brain."

I heard that giants such as Google and Facebook have threatened to shut down in protest =/

Really? Because Google have gone too far and controlling their activities is overdue. The other day I was asked to google for a subject which had the word 'abortion' in it. On the first page of results, Google turned up sponsored ads for abortion clinics which any child could have seen, would you want your kid to ask you what an abortion is because they've used Google? And don't say anything about 'online free speech', because first these are paid advertisements, which means Google accepts money to thrust filth into kids faces, and second we all know political and historical revisionist websites, and even irreverent sites such as Dramatica, might get more hits than those search results which end further up the page. Do you really think this is a coincidence?

Google, the owners of Youtube, fought tooth and claw against 'online censorship' when people objected to YouTube hosting videos of bullying for people all over the world to laugh at, a tolerance which in turn encouraged other people to upload their own videos of bullying, vandalism of property, animal abuse and god knows what else onto YouTube. Even now, YouTube are a hell of a lot quicker taing down material after getting a copyright notice from another corporation, than they are taking down a mobile phone video of bullying which some wankers uploaded. If it was one of Google's corporate CEOs in one of the videos, you can bet they'd come down a hell of a lot quicker lol.

Re: Internet Blacklist Legislation

A quick and strongly biased opinion of mine:

Censorship is EVIL !!! "Book Burners" of the new millenium !!!

(Don't take away my porn!, I love my 1st Amendment Right! If you don't like what's on the internet, then stay off it! Don't usurp my rights, that's a crime, "You can do whatever you want 'within reason', as long as it doesn't violate another person and their rights")

Pres. Obama wants to be like China, the Middle East, and many other countries too, where the internet and other forms of information is entirely controlled by the government.

You know... prisons "scrutinize the mail-information" into and out of the place. And now, we want to make the entire U.S. a prison, with the government, just like within the prison, "scrutinizing information" of what enters into, leaves, and travels within our country!

Socialism is bad enough... we don't need to become fascists too...

--------------------------------

and yes, the Internet is controlled by an oligarchy, I agree with Fainstmile on this (if I understood her view correctly).

ICAN or ICANN:

the "internet" exists as the "free internet that you nievely think it is", thanks to ICAN or ICANN:

the internet is open due to us, and we are able to control it completely in these 3 ways:

"The internet’s perfect for all manner of things, but productive discussion ain’t one of them. It provides scant room for debate and infinite opportunities for fruitless point-scoring: the heady combination of perceived anonymity, gestated responses, random heckling and a notional “live audience” quickly conspire to create a “perfect storm” of perpetual bickering." - Charlie Brooker

"I hold the wolf by the ears, I am in a dangerous situation and dare not let go" -an old saying in Latin

Re: Internet Blacklist Legislation

The internet is run by an oligarchy, and minority viewpints can be safely tolerated when the overwhelming message on the commonly accessed internet is the same as on the television. But my point is its an American oligarchy who use it to promote free market, liberal democratic values across the world. And don't forget who made the internet in the first place.

Much as OWS is actually a bunch of idiots unable to understand that Wall Street overwhelmingly ciontributes to left wing causes rather than conservative ones, so 'online free speech' people need to waken up to the internet as just another means of social control, and that free speech put into practice can let people like YouTube get away with anything against ordinary people, just by hiding behind anti-censorship.

Re: Internet Blacklist Legislation

Several thousand websites including Wikipedia and Google are planning a "blackout" tomorrow where their sites will be unavailable for the entire day starting at midnight. Plus this legislation is having a second look in Congress soon and the signing date has been pushed back. So I don't honestly see SOPA or PIPA passing especially if Facebook does a shut down as well.

Re: Internet Blacklist Legislation

Look, SOPA and PIPA are shit. We can pretty much agree on that. It goes too far, like the terrorism act.

Though the jumping on Obama for stuff that has been long in-development by members of Congress is a little much.

But what I can't stand is these unfounded assertions about the internet. I can't stand you guys saying that the internet is an American ploy to invade other countries. That's like saying Newton invented calculus as an English ploy to take over the world. The internet is a TOOL. It was developed from the Arpanet experiments in packet-switching over distances. I've seen the people who invented it. Just ask anybody in Silicon Valley in the 70's if they saw a big van going back and forth near Stanford - that was the van used by Dr. Cerf to develop TCP/IP!

You argue against revisionist history. Then stop reinforcing your own, cause this is damnright fact. Go to the Computer History museum.

Originally Posted by faintsmile1992

Really? Because Google have gone too far and controlling their activities is overdue. The other day I was asked to google for a subject which had the word 'abortion' in it. On the first page of results, Google turned up sponsored ads for abortion clinics which any child could have seen, would you want your kid to ask you what an abortion is because they've used Google?

Just tell the kid what it is - a medical procedure. Do they need to know more? Nope. Will they probably figure it out before they ask? Yeah. Also: even if you talk about censorship or internet blockers "for the children" often fails because the children are smart and subvert their parents all the time. God knows how many firewalls my classmates at Berkeley have defeated...

Quote:

And don't say anything about 'online free speech', because first these are paid advertisements, which means Google accepts money to thrust filth into kids faces, and second we all know political and historical revisionist websites, and even irreverent sites such as Dramatica, might get more hits than those search results which end further up the page. Do you really think this is a coincidence?

Actually it totally makes sense. Welcome to humans. We are savage bastards, and is it any surprise that a satirical website is more popular than a website with facts? It is possible to make any search result get more hits by "google bombing". Case example: Santorum.

We control the internet's content because it's dynamic, and we're fighting the infringement on that. We don't control the internet's connection because of many monopolies by communications companies. But that's a different subject.

Originally Posted by faintsmile1992

Much as OWS is actually a bunch of idiots unable to understand that Wall Street overwhelmingly ciontributes to left wing causes rather than conservative ones, so 'online free speech' people need to waken up to the internet as just another means of social control, and that free speech put into practice can let people like YouTube get away with anything.

OWS is about the lack of jobs in the US, a tangible problem. They were hijacked by the local anarchists where I live (who have been around long before OWS). So... this is a null point when OWS has to focus on that problem.

(OWS is also not so much partisan as about the lack of jobs, that both parties have contributed to. Still, how can we all forget that our economy died in the Bush administration? No, we don't care about when it started but when it happened, and that's when we lost a lot of prosperity.)

Re: Internet Blacklist Legislation

if SOPA and PIPA is approved on February every major corporation will sue people and earn millions by suing them for millions of dollars there's even an article of a guy downloading songs and got sued for millions of dollars(that kid is just a collage boy) and a single mom downloaded songs and got the same

even guys from other countries US ask that country to make the maker of the site to be sent to US for trial

Re: Internet Blacklist Legislation

INTERNETS, 18th of January 2012.
PRESS RELEASE, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.

Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for
the ear". He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person
to own the copyright to a motion picture.

Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures
in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call
Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent.
There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them - like
Fantasia, one of Disneys biggest hits ever.

So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they
circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: "stole") other peoples creative works,
without paying for it. They did it in order to make a huge profit. Today, they're all successful and most of the
studios are on the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world. Congratulations - it's all based on being
able to re-use other peoples creative works. And today they hold the rights to what other people create.
If you want to get something released, you have to abide to their rules. The ones they created after circumventing
other peoples rules.

The reason they are always complainting about "pirates" today is simple. We've done what they did. We circumvented the
rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. We allow
people to have direct communication between eachother, circumventing the profitable middle man, that in some cases take
over 107% of the profits (yes, you pay to work for them).
It's all based on the fact that we're competition.
We've proven that their existance in their current form is no longer needed. We're just better than they are.

And the funny part is that our rules are very similar to the founding ideas of the USA. We fight for freedom of speech.
We see all people as equal. We believe that the public, not the elite, should rule the nation. We believe that laws
should be created to serve the public, not the rich corporations.

The Pirate Bay is truly an international community. The team is spread all over the globe - but we've stayed out of the
USA. We have Swedish roots and a swedish friend said this:
The word SOPA means "trash" in Swedish. The word PIPA means "a pipe" in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence.
They want to make the internet inte a one way pipe, with them at the top, shoving trash through the pipe down to the
rest of us obedient consumers.
The public opinion on this matter is clear. Ask anyone on the street and you'll learn that noone wants to be fed with
trash. Why the US government want the american people to be fed with trash is beyond our imagination but we hope that
you will stop them, before we all drown.

SOPA can't do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we'll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the
hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to
mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really.
To fix the "problem of piracy" one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they're
creating "culture" but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls
become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching
movies and tv shows that make them think that they're fat.

In the great Sid Meiers computer game Civilization you can build Wonders of the world. One of the most powerful ones
is Hollywood. With that you control all culture and media in the world. Rupert Murdoch was happy with MySpace and had
no problems with their own piracy until it failed. Now he's complainting that Google is the biggest source of piracy
in the world - because he's jealous. He wants to retain his mind control over people and clearly you'd get a more
honest view of things on Wikipedia and Google than on Fox News.

Some facts (years, dates) are probably wrong in this press release. The reason is that we can't access this information
when Wikipedia is blacked out. Because of pressure from our failing competitors. We're sorry for that.

THE PIRATE BAY, (K)2012

QFT!

You're not paid to think;
A mindless worker is a happy worker,
so shut up and do your job.

Re: Internet Blacklist Legislation

Look, SOPA and PIPA are shit. We can pretty much agree on that. It goes too far, like the terrorism act.

Did it? Really?

Weren't the Bush haters saying how the terrorism acts would make America into a fascist government lol?

Quote:

Though the jumping on Obama for stuff that has been long in-development by members of Congress is a little much.

But what I can't stand is these unfounded assertions about the internet. I can't stand you guys saying that the internet is an American ploy to invade other countries. That's like saying Newton invented calculus as an English ploy to take over the world. The internet is a TOOL. It was developed from the Arpanet experiments in packet-switching over distances. I've seen the people who invented it. Just ask anybody in Silicon Valley in the 70's if they saw a big van going back and forth near Stanford - that was the van used by Dr. Cerf to develop TCP/IP!

You argue against revisionist history. Then stop reinforcing your own, cause this is damnright fact. Go to the Computer History museum.

I linked to the well reasoned article yet you aren't able to defend it except by some straw man which doesn't actually address the point made - the internet has from the onset been linked to 'Netism', which is a liberal philosophy (in the historical sense). And America, the global capital of globalism and liberalism, first tells other countries not to block the internet then throws its toys out of the pram because of 'un-American' ideas coming into America.

And when did I argue for or against against revisionist history?

Quote:

Just tell the kid what it is - a medical procedure. Do they need to know more? Nope. Will they probably figure it out before they ask? Yeah. Also: even if you talk about censorship or internet blockers "for the children" often fails because the children are smart and subvert their parents all the time. God knows how many firewalls my classmates at Berkeley have defeated...

I'll also tell them its a surgical procedure that, if its to be legal at all (which IMO it shouldn't) should be done to more blacks than to whites because they have a higher crime rate that can be explained by genetic factors, and how it can be used to remove homosexuals when the gay gene is identified and proves gayness is natural like Downs Syndrome. Or would you not want your kids to find that info at the top of the page on Google?

Even your attitude to how parents should just expect their kids to ask questions like what abortion is and not feel outrage, is culture specific and confirms what I said about the (only) internet as American cultural imperialism, because you're expecting people to have a normal American attitude.

If people like you can use the internet to bring your agendas into peoples homes through the internet, how come mine is hate speech and ends up further down the page? That's right, its a monopoly which suits you so you will defend it. There's no such thing as morally right or wrong, only perspective.

And I don't care that firewalls and censorship sometimes fail because every little bit helps.

For all you tried to make me and HK look like mad conspiracy theorists, why don't you try explaining rationally why the American government wants to regulate internet content? Because of what? Because government is evil so they do this kind of thing for the shits and giggles lol?

Its like you're other post the other day in the 'Thoughts on the Life Sciences' thread'... insulting peoples intelligence and drowning them out with verbose and irrelevant text to make yourself look intelligent... and yet complaining that the military hijacked NASA as though they didn't have a legitimate interest from the start.

Re: Internet Blacklist Legislation

The ICANN (as can be found and watched in my previous post) is an American group, which has somewhat "just recently" (some X years ago - lol) added the country domains (.eu, .ru, .se, .es, .jp, etc), that's direct American control-monopolization of the internet right there, as priorly these country domains didn't exist, limiting the other countries from such use of the internet

in just the very first six minutes of the vid: WE, THE U.S., COMPLETELY CONTROL THE INTERNET, lol !!!

and here's a link (found also on one of my early posts in the Thoughts on Life Sciences thread), of HOW we are in fact completely controlled (by any one or sum of these: Corporations, Government, and the U.S. country itself):

Law: Who's to stop Obama from labeling me, some other American citizen, a KKK member, a Black Panther member, a Republican, a Democrat, and etc, as an "enemy combatant", having a drone shoot a missile and blowing us up into "blood n guts soup" all over our surroundings, without a trial nor guilty verdict, which is our Constitutional Right as an American citizen ???

Last edited by HegemonKhan; January 23, 2012 at 08:11 PM.

"The internet’s perfect for all manner of things, but productive discussion ain’t one of them. It provides scant room for debate and infinite opportunities for fruitless point-scoring: the heady combination of perceived anonymity, gestated responses, random heckling and a notional “live audience” quickly conspire to create a “perfect storm” of perpetual bickering." - Charlie Brooker

"I hold the wolf by the ears, I am in a dangerous situation and dare not let go" -an old saying in Latin

Re: Internet Blacklist Legislation

"If the state is preparing itself to act violently against its enemies, why would it want to let them know its coming?"

And from the comments page lol.

"I wonder if all the shitty little leftists who opposed Bush as the New Hitler, will be objecting to Obama signing this
National Defense Authorization Act."

Really, anyone who believes the American government never killed people without trial before some act was passed is living in a dream world. It's kind of like those people who object to the idea of the CIA killing President Kennedy because Americans and their government are protected by a constitution, but who are fine with accepting that kind of thing as historical fact in other countries.

Re: Internet Blacklist Legislation

Originally Posted by kidopitz27

if SOPA and PIPA is approved on February every major corporation will sue people and earn millions by suing them for millions of dollars there's even an article of a guy downloading songs and got sued for millions of dollars(that kid is just a collage boy) and a single mom downloaded songs and got the same

even guys from other countries US ask that country to make the maker of the site to be sent to US for trial

Well, on this I don't quite agree. This would be plausible under the assumption that the people being sued have millions of dollars lol. I assure you college kids are not going to be sued for millions of dollars for the simple fact that they do not generally have them. Companies are smart, you can't get any more millions from a broke kid than you can get blood from a stone. The issue at hand with this new legislation is the sheer amount of websites that could be forced to shut down. Heck, in many cases its not the actual owners that publish copyrighted information but rather users and yet it is the websites that are going to pay for that. Its barbaric and anyone who uses the internet (whether legally or illegally) will be negatively affected. There is barely anyone who would not be negatively affected.
___________________________________

now, lets take a look at what might happen once this is approved in the US. US has always been very keen about protecting patents and copyrights abroad. When it comes to international trade it is not unusual for them to demand from other countries measures regarding this sort of thing. An obvious examples would be generic medicines which they usually dislike in favor of the non generic ones. Basically, it is a very commonplace thing for the US to demand for other countries to stop making generic medicines when making many sorts of negotiations even though non generic medicines are far more expensive and less people would get access to them (or getting them would result in already poor lifestyles getting poorer). I would think that once the US implements something along the lines of SOPA they would start having similar demands regarding controlling the internet (assuming they aren't doing that already) in other nations. Heck, many nations already have problems regarding their freedom to use internet, forcing governments for the sake of trade to implement such measures would only make things worst in those places (I know my government is looking for even the mildest of excuses to control the internet a tad (actually a lot) more. Sopa is to the benefit of no one whatsoever. heck, it wouldn't even be weird for companies to be worst off (lets face it, free, perhaps not so legal stuff, over the internet is wonderful marketing).

Even if my little idea of the US making nations control online copyrighted as part of trade agreements is not quite accurate, there are still other issues at hand which are a hazard. Whether a particular nation likes or dislikes the US, the US is still in many forms seen as a more developed society. The moment the US starts this sort of thing a number of other nations will start similar programs for the sake of controlling the internet. Once sopa is implemented such countries can simply start saying developed nations are also controlling the internet and there is no reason for them to not do it. The precedent set by sopa can have horrible repercussions....

I gotta say this again, the notion that companies would sue people without millions for millions is absurd. There is no rational, economical or coherent reason for such a thing to even begin to make a shred of sense. Its not even worth doing to set an example, the sheer amount of bad publicity such an inhuman act would result in and the sheer amount of ill will the company would create among its very customers is absurd.

Re: Internet Blacklist Legislation

Originally Posted by kkck

Even if my little idea of the US making nations control online copyrighted as part of trade agreements is not quite accurate, there are still other issues at hand which are a hazard. Whether a particular nation likes or dislikes the US, the US is still in many forms seen as a more developed society. The moment the US starts this sort of thing a number of other nations will start similar programs for the sake of controlling the internet. Once sopa is implemented such countries can simply start saying developed nations are also controlling the internet and there is no reason for them to not do it. The precedent set by sopa can have horrible repercussions....

Well it's not that inaccurate...I don't know how many people heard about ACTA here...a trade agreement started by the US and Japan...signed by EU, Poland, and recently signed by Obama without the knowledge of the congress(at least that's what I've heard, so please correct me if I'm wrong)...which groups counterfeit goods and online piracy together...so the issue is not the economic repercussions on someone, but rather going to jail or not